Midori

Midori is an alternate browser for Linux based on WebKit and GTK+. One might consider running Midori/WebKit on the XO if one requires a (very) fast-launching, fast-loading browser with minimal dependencies. Arora, a WebKit browser that requires Qt, is also a good pick. How fast is fast, by the way? Midori's pretty much up two seconds from clicking its icon on Sugar's Desktop.

Screenshots

Image:MidoriOnXODesktop.png, Image:MidoriInterfaceOnXO.png, Image:MidoriRunningFullScreen.png

Installing Midori on XO

Easy enough - install Midori from the repository:

# su -
# yum install midori

Note: The version of Midori in the Fedora repository is 0.0.18-1.fc9, which is old. To install the latest version. 0.0.21:

yum install unique
wget http://koji.fedoraproject.org/packages/WebKit/1.0.0/0.11.svn34655.fc9/i386/WebKit-gtk-1.0.0-0.11.svn34655.fc9.i386.rpm
rpm -Uhv WebKit-gtk-1.0.0-0.11.svn34655.fc9.i386.rpm
wget http://koji.fedoraproject.org/packages/midori/0.0.21/1.fc9/i386/midori-0.0.21-1.fc9.i386.rpm
rpm -Uhv midori-0.0.21-1.fc9.i386.rpm

Sugarizing Midori

Try out Sugarize to give Midori an icon. When sug prompted for the command:

Enter the terminal command used to start the program.
ie, "firefox" or "mplayer -f"

I used:

> midori

If you need a nice icon for Sugar, try out this one: Image:Activity-midori.svg.

Adding more icons

If you launch Midori, you may notice that its toolbar is missing a few icons. We can use the Gnome icon theme to fill in the blanks.

Install the Gnome icon theme:

# su -
# yum install gnome-icon-theme

Then edit the Sugar icon theme file so that it inherits from the Gnome theme:

# nano /usr/share/icons/sugar/index.theme

Add "Inherits=gnome" as a new line right under the "[Icon Theme]" heading. Now none of the icons will show the "missing image" icon.

Caveats

In my experience, Midori may freeze or display visual glitches upon loading some websites. I'd love to figure out why this is... Midori also seems to forget the preferences in-between launches when launching it using the Sugarized method. Weird. Could this be because the Sugarized method runs Midori inside a sandbox?